


Marks

by ladygrey3



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Jewish Character, Conversations, F/F, Fluff, Past Abuse, Tattoos, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 07:29:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18116144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygrey3/pseuds/ladygrey3
Summary: Kitty and Rachel have a conversation, and everything is genuinely okay.





	Marks

It’s summer, and everything is sort of alright for once. No one is attacking the school or trying to take over the world. No one Kitty loves seems to be dying at the moment. The students are being quiet, wherever they are, and the sun is a fat ball of melting honey in a radiant sky, and the birds outside are improvising like the front lawn is an audition space for the next Disney movie. And Rachel is there, sitting in the big plaid armchair, absently trying to bounce an errant chunk of hair off of her nose with TK. Rachel is in the same room as Kitty, and there aren’t any super villains or alien invasions involved, at least not yet, and that fact by itself is enough to make everything sort of alright. More than sort of alright.   
Rachel scowls at the general area beyond her nose. The disobedient curl of scarlet hair twitches and flops to one side. Without really thinking, Kitty reaches across her chair and flicks the hair over behind Rachel’s ear. The scowl slides over to focus on Kitty, and Kitty kind of wants to kiss it, but she’s too tired and comfortable to move, so instead she just floats the thought out at like a message in a bottle. Rachel’s ears turn a delicate rose and she half-smiles down at her lap. Kitty grins, despite her best intentions. Rachel is a wild tangle of contradictions in ways which are both frustrating and infinitely entertaining. Her bright burning girl, her fearless and filthy-minded war angel, who blushes and stammers like a schoolboy over the most pedestrian gestures of affection.   
“You can extrapolate a hell of a lot from some hair,” Rachel mutters.   
“It’s my mutant superpower,” Kitty says cheerfully. “Remember the Phoenix mullet? Those were good times.”  
Rachel rolls her eyes, grinning. “That mullet is going to haunt me longer than most of the people I’ve actually killed. And hey, you don’t get to throw stones about poor fashion choices, Flashdance.”  
“That’s fair,” Kitty agrees, settling lazily back into the chair. “I have some regrets. Most of those regrets involve leg warmers.”  
“At least neither of us did the green-dress-yellow-rubber-gloves Marvel Girl look. I’ve seen pictures, that shit was not flattering. Besides, I’m pretty sure that was just my mom’s favourite dress with a mask.”  
“Before my time. When I showed up she was doing the original Phoenix thing.” Satiny green and gold, with the sleek ripple of muscle underneath. “That one didn’t look too bad.”  
Rachel’s response is a lingering pause. Curious, Kitty glances over to see her staring back, eyes wide and brilliant.   
“Oh my God,” she says, hushed. “Kitty. You had a crush on her. You had a crush on my mom.”  
“No I didn’t,” Kitty replies automatically, and then swallows a cringe. Lie to your telepathic girlfriend, why don’t you, Pryde. That sounds like something that couldn’t possibly go wrong.   
“Yeah, you did!” Rachel lets out an airless little laugh, shaking her head. “I don’t believe it. What the actual hell.”  
“Okay, it was like—it was a long time ago, Red. And it was complicated.”  
“Really? ‘Cause what you were just thinking seemed pretty straightforward to me.”  
“Well, for starters, I was thirteen, alright? And I had literally just figured out I was a mutant and all these people were trying to kill me for no reason. And then all of a sudden this woman comes up, and she’s insanely powerful and seems like she totally has it together, and okay, honesty time? She’s gorgeous. Jean was hot, which, incidentally, she passed on to you—”  
“Oh, thanks.”  
“Hey, still talking. And then she saved my life like six times in the course of two hours. So yes, there may have been some adolescent infatuation involved for like five minutes. But I was a kid and it was dumb, and anyway it has nothing to do with the reasons I like you.”  
“Sure. Besides my inherited hotness.”  
“Yeah. Pun intended.”  
Rachel scowls, but it’s too theatrical to have any venom in it. “You’re a bad, bad, person.”  
“I’m your bad, bad, person,” Kitty replies hopefully.   
“Yeah, you are. God help us both.” Rachel sighs, a look of resignation moving across her face. Fierce warmth rises up in Kitty’s chest, like sunlight. Absently, she reaches out and runs a fingertip across the angular crimson mark of one of Rachel’s tattoos.   
In her plaid armchair, Rachel goes absolutely still, like an animal which has just become aware that it’s being watched. A perfect bright blankness closes over her eyes. It’s more a lack of reaction than anything, and it passes between heartbeats, but Kitty sees it and feels her fingers go stiff and cold on Rachel’s face. She pulls away sharply and Rachel starts breathing again. Kitty drops her hand into her lap and holds it there where it can’t do any more damage. The cold is in her nerves, now, crawling up her wrist.   
“Sorry,” she says rigidly. She doesn’t want to look at Rachel’s face, and she’s not sure why.   
“It’s okay,” Rachel says, her voice a little uneven. “I mean, I—it’s my fault.”  
Kitty doesn’t say anything, mostly because part of her agrees with Rachel and the other part wants to take a conversational break to punch herself in the face a little bit.   
“It bothers you,” Rachel says quietly, after the moment of silence has stretched just a little too long.   
Again, Kitty feels around for an appropriate response. “It bothers me that it bothers you,” she says finally.   
“Yeah, but it also just bothers you.”  
Not much point in denying that. “I like your face,” Kitty says cautiously. “I’d like to be able to touch it. But if I can’t that’s okay too, you know.”  
Rachel’s mouth twists a little and pulls inward in a way that makes something ache between Kitty’s ribs. She nods distantly and stares at something on the opposite side of the far wall. Outside, a bird fires off an obnoxiously vivid burst of song.   
You can, Rachel says in her head, her voice like a scrawl written in white light. If you really want to.   
Kitty’s heart jumps, and she looks abruptly back at Rachel, who is now gazing at her evenly, her eyes gentle.   
“Are you sure?” she says. She tries to clear the excitement out of her voice and her thoughts. It would be too easy for that to become cruel to Rachel.   
Rachel shrugs, the spikes on her jacket shifting in a way that almost manages to be dismissive. If you want. I should probably try to get over it anyway.  
Kitty’s eager hand half-lifts before reason catches up with her and she hesitates, fingers curled in midair. “Are you super sure? Are you sure you’re sure?”  
Rachel rolls her eyes again, somewhat more harshly, and snatches Kitty’s hand out of the air. She presses it clumsily against the side of her own face, where the tattoos march up and down like violent apostrophes. “Just do it, Pryde,” she says out loud, her voice a little hoarse. “Go ahead. Go crazy.”  
Kitty can feel the pump and swirl of her blood in the tips of her fingers and the soft places of her brain. Very carefully, with the reverent gentleness she would use to touch fresh paint, she traces the long claw of a tattoo. They always remind her of the markings of a tiger, and although she would never say this about a symbol knotted up with so much bitter pain, that similarity seems somehow appropriate for Rachel. The predatory grace of a carnivore, all beauty and danger. Beneath the bruised red ink, she thinks she can feel subtle indentations, like scarring, although that is probably an illusion.   
She’s tried to sketch this moment in her imagination so many times that even now, when it’s actually happening, a quality of the dreamlike abstract clings to it. She tells herself to memorize this, because it might never happen again. Drink up the delirium of Ray’s cheekbone against her palm. Name and qualify each savage mark that crosses her skin. It’s all so important and one or both of them will probably be dead by the time Rachel agrees to do this again, so she tries to hold everything in her memory, like a moment caught in a snow globe.   
Rachel is very still beneath her hand, but present. Her breathing is a practiced pull and release. Kitty can feel how hard she’s struggling against the numb static that swallowed her up before. She wonders if Rachel can feel the awe in her fingertips. Rachel’s face is a sacred text in a bloody language that Kitty is still only beginning to learn how to speak.   
As Kitty’s hand passes over the fan of tattoos that reach down to frame Rachel’s eyes, Rachel says tonelessly “I know they’re ugly.”  
Kitty’s fingers halt and she stares at Rachel in dazed silence.   
“I know what they look like,” Rachel goes on, in a voice that leaves no possibility open for doubt or contradiction. “They’re ugly. They’re disgusting, really.”  
“No they’re not,” Kitty says, her voice returning to her in a sudden spasm of shock. “They’re not, okay?”  
“They’re ugly,” Rachel continues. Her tone has a strange desperate force in it. “But I’m okay with that now. I’m grateful for it, even. Everyone can tell what I am just by looking at me. It’s useful. I don’t have to spend all my time warning people. They do the warning for me.”  
She’s speaking more quickly now, insistent, as if daring some unseen listener to contradict her. Her eyes stare brilliant and empty at a space beyond Kitty’s shoulder. Her jaw is pulled very tight.   
There are a lot of things about Rachel that Kitty doesn’t quite understand, even after all these years. But there are other things about Rachel that Kitty knows almost too well. They’re in the fabric of her, written in secret places on her bones. She knows some things, and because of that, she runs her fingers across Rachel’s brows, even though every instinct in her is howling to grab Rachel and shake her and yell you’re beautiful and precious and good, why can’t you see how beautiful and precious and good you are, you enormous idiot. This course of action is generally her first instinct and it never works out, partially because Rachel wears shoulder spikes that are more functional than decorative and doesn’t respond well to loud voices. So instead, Kitty counts her tattoos, one by one, and lets the words come to her.   
“You know, when I was little,” she says, my “grandparents had these friends. The Essens. I noticed, when I was like six or seven, that the Essens had tattoos on their arms. Now, they were like eighty, you understand, so I figured that they hadn’t gotten inked up to declare their loyalty to their favourite punk band or whatever.”  
Rachel lets out a tight snort. Kitty grins softly in response, and brushes back Rachel’s hair to reveal the marks that arch across her pale forehead, and slides the very tip of her fingernail down to a point. She feels the faint, controlled, shudder that grips Rachel; the flutter of some dizzy feeling between horror and pleasure.   
“I asked my mom,” she continues, more quietly, “I asked her why the Essens would get tattoos of random numbers. And she said that they didn’t want to. Someone else did it to them. People who hated them for the way they were born, and who would have done the same thing to us, me and my mom, if they could. They didn’t choose it, and it wasn’t their fault.”  
Rachel’s shoulders, during this, have been gradually gathering closer and closer together, as if she is attempting to close up like an umbrella and disappear from this conversation. Gently, Kitty slides her hand down to frame Rachel’s cheeks, as if she can keep Rachel present by the power of her touch. She needs Rachel to be here now.   
“I didn’t understand,” she says, her voice as calm and even as she can make it. “I asked why they would keep the tattoos if they were so terrible. My mom said that they had decided to keep them because those tattoos meant they had made it through the hardest thing any human being could ever experience and they were still alive and okay. They hadn’t been killed or turned into monsters. They survived.”  
She curls her fingers under Rachel’s chin and tilts it up until those eyes meet hers.   
“Do you know why I like you?” she asks. “Besides the crazy inherited hotness, obviously.”  
Rachel gives a sharp, breathless, laugh, her face twisting, and shakes her head. Her eyes are dark and opaque.   
Kitty strokes the rigid line of her jaw, down to her smooth throat above the high collar of her uniform. “I like you because you’re tough. No, come on, don’t laugh at me. It’s true. You’re strong and fierce and you don’t take anybody’s shit. You’re a warrior. I really like that about you.”  
A weak smile rose on Rachel’s face. “Thanks.”  
“Just stating the obvious, Ray. You’re a badass. And I know you’re a badass because you’ve seen just about the worst stuff there is and not only did you make it out alive, you made it out with your soul intact. You’re a good person. You really are, still, even after everything. You’re a good person and you’re so tough that nothing they could do to you could make you anything less. That’s not ugly. That’s like the opposite of ugly.”  
Rachel tilts her head into Kitty’s palm. Her breath is a delicate whisper, like moth wings brushing across her skin Her eyes are closed. Kitty feels the living warmth of her cheek. Gently, Rachel rolls her head to one side and presses a weightless kiss to the base of Kitty’s palm. Kitty’s heart stammers and forgets to beat for a moment that is simultaneously delicious and terrifying.   
Rachel’s eyes open, clear and glittering, full of too many things to name. “I forget sometimes,” she says, her voice a sweet rasp, “how smart you are.”  
It’s an odd way to respond to Kitty’s little monologue, but it’s better than the fuck off, you don’t get it that Kitty was half-expecting, “Yeah, it’s not like I graduated from UChicago or anything.”  
Rachel responds by biting Kitty’s hand, very lightly, her teeth leaving a line of damp pale dashes in the skin. “Watch it, Pryde.”  
“Biting isn’t a real rhetorical tactic, Red.” Kitty rubs her hand back through Rachel’s hair.. “Anyway. You get what I mean.”  
Rachel’s fingers curl around Kitty’s where they twine in her hair. Her touch is soft and surprisingly sure. She smiles at Kitty, and Kitty is once again struck by the almost physical power of her strange of her strange wild loveliness. She’s like the blinding glare of a desert sun, or a whirlwind. She shouldn’t be human. The fact that she’s here, dressed in flesh and blood and bone, with fingers that wrap around Kitty’s and a smile that illuminates her whole body, is nothing short of proof that miracles are possible.   
“I don’t think I do, really,” Rachel murmurs. “But we can always talk about it more later, right?”  
Kitty exhales, running her thumb over Rachel’s cheekbone. “Yeah,” she replies, “We can do that.”  
It’s a sunny day. The kids are behaving themselves, the sky is bright and no one is dying. It won’t last, but for now, everything is fine. Better than fine. For now.

**Author's Note:**

> hey remember when Chris Claremont said that Rachel was the love of Kitty's life? cause I sure do


End file.
